Environmental Detection of Brilliant Blue, Sunset Yellow and Tartrazine Using Direct Injection HPLC-DAD Technique

A newly developed direct injection HPLC-DAD method for the simultaneous detection of Brilliant Blue (BB), Sunset Yellow (SY) and Tartrazine (TA) synthetic dyes was validated and applied to surface and wastewater samples. Chromatographic separation was achieved using an Acclaim Surfactant Plus column (150 x 3.0 mm, 3 um) in isocratic elution mode with a mobile phase consisting of 100 mM CH3COONH4 and ACN in the ratio 50/50 (v/v). Linear calibration curves were plotted in the range of 2-100 μg/L (BB) and 6-300 μg/L (SY, TA) respectively with correlation coefficients (R2) higher than 0.99. Low quantitation limit values (LOQ) were obtained for the direct injection HPLCDAD method, namely: 1.0 µg/L (BB), 5.5 µg/L (SY) and 5.8 µg/L (TA), respectively. The entire sample preparation procedure consisted only in simple filtration using PTFE syringe filters (0.45 µm) without sample extraction or concentration, which improved method accuracy and precision. HPLC-DAD developed method proved to be fast (6 minutes run-time), sensitive and accurate and was successfully applied for the analysis of the synthetic dyes in surface and wastewater samples. Considering all
analyzed samples (8 surface water and 11 wastewater samples), Brilliant Blue was found in influent
samples with values between 4.49 ÷ 14.17 µg/L and effluent samples with values between 1.07 ÷ 9.54
µg/L, whereas Sunset Yellow and Tartrazine were not detected in any of the analyzed samples.